SPOTLIGHTS:

PARC in the news

"The trend toward using labor-saving machines and software isn't limited to factories. W. Brian Arthur, an economist at PARC, says businesses are increasingly using computers and software in the place of people in the nation's vast service sector. Many companies, for instance, use automation to process orders or send bills. 'It's not just machines replacing people, though there's some of that,' Mr. Arthur says. 'It's much more the digitization of the whole economy.'"

article excerpt: "It's time for VCs to return to boldness. We must find and help build the revolutionary startups that will generate transformational change and create billions in value. That is where the returns lie."

PARC comment excerpt: "We'd like to point out, though, that there are problems that are simply too big and complex for any one type of entity... So if VCs and startups want to play a role in fostering disruptive change, they need to connect the players, beyond their typical networks. Besides enabling access to expertise and resources not otherwise available to small companies, PARC for example helps create the partnerships and ecosystem necessary to solve big, complex problems."

"'It's amazing from a small company's point of view to work with these guys because you have ideas that you want to see as an extension of your product and some of these research centers, amazingly enough, are working on these concepts,' Pfeiffer [CTO of Power Assure] said. 'You can find really amazing case studies, research that you can then leverage for your own development.'"

"PARC, which once served only Xerox, now has an expanding list of technologies in development with outside partners that include Fujitsu, Motorola, NEC Display Solutions, Microsoft, Samsung, SolFocus, and Oracle. The change in strategy has helped turn it from a multimillion-dollar financial sinkhole into a modest, but growing, innovation business.

For PARC, the partnerships are signs that open innovation is working. 'There are plenty of great ideas at PARC, but you learn early on that execution is often the hard part—execution and timing,' says St. Claire. '...You almost have to be as innovative in the commercialization—especially when you have game-changing technologies—as on the technology side.'"

"Although we generally associate technological advancements with the companies that successfully commercialize them, there are often underappreciated bodies toiling away behind the curtain. In many cases over the last 40 years, PARC has been that hidden player…

PARC continues to tinker with bleeding edge technology, with much of it focused on 'clean tech.'…It's also studying sensemaking along with other human behaviors and working on 'context-aware, content-centric' networking to improve the way data shifts around the Internet."

"'For example,' Sutija says. 'Think of your car. Right now you rely on a maintenance schedule for replacements, repairs, service, etc. But imagine that the individual components of your car can be tagged – your brakes can tell you when they need to be replaced by using its own sensors and reporting the information.'

That’s the future that Thinfilm is working towards through a new partnership with PARC, a Xerox company. Last October, the two companies announced that they had created a printable chip using PARC’s transistors and Thinfilm’s memory to create a low-cost, low-power memory that’s capable of being subject to programming logic."

"PowerCloud Systems, a spin-out of PARC that offers a ‘networking-as-a-service’ platform for OEMs and service providers, has raised $6 million in Series B funding in a round led by Qualcomm Ventures, with prior backers Walden Venture Capital, Javelin Venture Partners and PARC participating...PowerCloud Systems is not only a spin-out from PARC, but its technology is also supported by intellectual property developed at the research center, including 10 patents in areas ranging from cloud-virtualized network controllers to usable security."

"One might almost call these machines the third great sex: in the labour market now, it is not simply a question of men versus women, but men, women – and machines.

Does this matter? Brian Arthur, an esteemed economist, scientist and visiting scholar at PARC, thinks it does. For the crucial thing to understand about these new digitised machines…is that they are not automating human processes; …these machines have been communicating with each other and interacting with decreasing human oversight. The net result is the rise of a second, 'digitized economy', which is operating alongside the 'real' human world – and threatening to change our economy in profound ways."

This is disruptive innovation—making the complicated simple, making the expensive affordable, driving growth by transforming what exists and creating what doesn't. And it appears to be working: profits in Xerox's services business rose..."

Can the Jobs-and-Income Crisis End Well?Some economists believe that today's grinding unemployment and slow growth are masking the transition to a vibrant digital economy25 November 2011 | Bloomberg BusinessWeek by Chris Farrell

"In recent writings, such scholars as Eric Brynjolfsson, Andrew McAfee, W. Brian Arthur, and Richard Florida, as well as consultants at McKinsey & Co., have made a strong case that we’re living through a transition toward an economy dominated by a digital ecosystem. 'Technological progress—in particular, improvements in computer hardware, software, and networks—has been so rapid and so surprising that many present-day organizations, institutions, policies, and mindsets are not keeping up,' write Brynjolfsson and McAfee, scholars at the MIT Sloan School of Management and authors of the e-book, Race Against the Machine. Adds Arthur, a visiting researcher with PARC in a McKinsey & Co. essay: 'Is this the biggest change since the Industrial Revolution? Well, without sticking my neck out too far, I believe so.'"

"IDTechEx recently visited PARC in California and learnt of its business model today, culture, and legacy pioneering technological change...among many other industry contributions.

Below, I share some updates on what IDTechEx has been observing at PARC. Taken together, these updates convey an important movement beyond the enabling materials, processes, equipment, and components."

Fresh Copy: How Ursula Burns Reinvented XeroxXerox's PARC research center has already developed a host of technologies to transform the service industry--parking meters that can call 911 and road sensors that ticket you if you go too fast.19 November 2011 | Fast Company by Ellen McGirt

"'Look,' Burns chimes in [a joint conversation with PARC CEO Steve Hoover], 'not everything that happens here makes it to the marketplace. But PARC now has a model that allows them to dream beyond the boundaries of what Xerox can use...'"

PARC's Best Idea Today: A Better, Faster, Stronger InternetWe asked the Palo Alto Research Center -- the guys who invented the Ethernet...and the laser printer -- to tell us the most interesting thing they're working on today. Here's what they gave us.10 November 2011 | The Atlantic by Derek Thompson

"The problem: …The tubes, if you will, get congested. This is partly because the Internet was designed to be a communications network -- in which users connect with each other -- but it has become a distribution network, where one piece of media goes out to many different users. We need a new Internet to deal with new media.

The idea: PARC is trying to build that new Internet with a technology called 'content-centric networking' or CCN. Here's a dramatically simplified version of how this idea is supposed to work...

The potential: A faster, more powerful, more secure, and all-around better Internet."

"There’s something big happening right now. I’m not referring to any of the popular technology memes per se—big data, social, cloud, mobile, augmented reality, context, post-PC devices, consumerization, 3-D printing, etc. I’m referring to something behind, and beyond, all of these technologies: the digitization of decision making. This increasing trend is creating a 'second economy' underneath and alongside the physical economy we know so well, and on a revolutionary scale…

[PARC visiting researcher and Santa Fe Institute external professor W. Brian] Arthur argues that this second economy, which author Nick Carr in turn dubs the age of 'deep automation,' may represent the biggest shift since the Industrial Revolution, and lead to increases in productivity output as well as decreases in physical jobs.

...Since joining PARC, a Xerox company approaching its 10-year anniversary as a business for open innovation with multiple clients, I have been focused on the following question: just what will happen to invention and innovation in this second economy? More specifically, what will be the role of R&D and innovation organizations in a new global innovation landscape?"

Dentsu and PARC reach ethnography agreementResearch firm Dentsu Marketing Insight and its ad agency parent have reached an agreement with Xerox-owned innovation firm PARC to source ethnography services.9 November 2011 | Research by James Verrinder

"PARC Ethnography Services Group will work with the Japanese firms to make naturalistic, in-person studies of consumer behaviour available to Dentsu clients.

Kenichi Kobayashi, CEO at Dentsu Marketing Insight, said: "Ethnographic research scientifically defines how to truly understand your customer. We know our clients will now see their services, brands, and products in a completely new light through these ethnographic findings."

"Meshin, a Xerox-funded incubator project at PARC, updated its beta Android application that hopes to 'bring order to communication chaos.'

...there’s a number of companies working on this problem. However, I’m surprised that these applications aren’t getting adopted by the mass market: More people are buying smartphones, so it’s not unreasonable to assume that these same people are or will be inundated by notifications and messages.

Am I the only one with 'communication chaos' or do I just have too many digital contacts across my work and personal worlds? Regardless, I’m keeping an eye on this space."

Why Ideas are UnprofitableAmerican companies are not proficient at turning original concepts into vibrant businesses. What they need is a balanced approach to innovation27 October 2011 | Bloomberg BusinessWeek by Matt Reilly

"The dirty little secret about American ingenuity is that we’re terrible at translating original ideas into profit-producing businesses. This might be considered heresy in the era of popular thinkfests such as TED and Davos, but ideas are inherently unprofitable. The value of an idea (and its inventor) is essentially zero. True economic value lies in the person or company that can figure out how to scale an idea and deliver it efficiently to market.

...Companies presently caught in the innovation death spiral need not despair. In 2002, Palo Alto Research Center was incorporated as an independent business. Today, it is a $60 million research organization that helps clients leverage their own technologies while seasoning them with concepts originated in-house."

"Thin Film Electronics ASA and PARC have combined their printed memory and organic addressing regime, respectively, to create a working prototype of a printed non-volatile memory. The ferroelectric polymer storage is addressed with p- and n-type organic circuits similar to CMOS circuitry."

"We shouldn't make the false choice between security and innovation," VanRoekel said Tuesday at PARC, the storied Xerox research company in Palo Alto, Calif. "In fact, innovation can make us more secure as long as we build security into everything we do."

"It’s not a coincidence that my first speech is being made in PARC," Steven VanRoekel tells a roomful of curious people in Silicon Valley who have come to spend their Tuesday evening to find out what the nation’s federal chief information officer actually does.

"America’s future now depends on our capacity to innovate, and to harness technology," VanRoekel says during his first public speech in his new role as America’s second chief information officer at PARC’s auditorium in Palo Alto. The event was organized by the Silicon Valley social and business groups The Churchill Club, TechNet and TechAmerica.

The legendary PARC has played a role in the development of many game-changing aspects of modern computing from the development of personal computers to key details such as the graphical user interface. The company, a subsidiary of Xerox, continues to work with both private companies and governments to come up with new ideas in computing and business processes."

"Printed electronics have been advancing in bits and pieces for years -- a crude processor here, a basic memory device there. Now researchers at PARC and the Norwegian company Thinfilm Electronics have announced a printed electronic device that, for the first time, marries transistors with memory.

...Earlier this year, Thinfilm showed off a handheld device capable of reading cards printed with circuits that store 20 bits of data. In May, the company announced engineering deals with two major toy manufacturers who plan to use its printable memory.

...The prototype is a 'building block' that can be used for a number of different applications, says Raghu Das, CEO of IDTechEx, a research firm. 'There has been a huge effort on printing transistors globally,' Das says, 'but very poor effort on making useful building blocks like this, which can be used horizontally for many applications.' The announcement by PARC and Thinfilm, he says, is 'very good news.'"

"Cheaper, two-way circuits may change the way objects and phones carry and transmit information, but their success depends on NFC's wider adoption in the mobile payment marketplace.

The Addressable Memory transistors by Thinfilm and PARC are printed on thin plastic and cost a fraction of their silicon equivalents, RFID tags. They can also both send and receive data from smartphones, unlike the passive product labels available on today's market.

The chips are set to be unveiled in 2012, with plans to have them wirelessly broadcast information about products by 2013."

"Thin Film Electronics ASA...has developed a way to add computing to its circuits through a partnership with Xerox PARC. This means it can offer thin, disposable tracking tags for a few cents apiece, and it could soon provide a valuable component for the Internet of things.

Thin Film is an Oslo-based company that has been in business since the mid-90s. It has been manufacturing thin-film memory chips that provide about 20 kilobytes of storage, which were used in toys and games. But thanks to its partnership with PARC it has added transistors to its circuits, which gives the chips a soupcon of intelligence — enough to perhaps track inventory or send environmental data from a sensor back to the network. It has also added a bit more memory.

…A low price is important, because it makes the technology far more accessible than RFID or other technology that today is used for tracking high-value inventory. RFID chips are built on silicon and can cost a few dollars, so aren’t practical for everyday items."

"Thinfilm and PARC's breakthrough is a technology that can print not only memory onto, well, thin films, but can now also print transistors to address and manage that memory.

…Up until Friday's announcement, Thinfilm's non-volatile, ferroelectric memory was completely passive – it just sat there, holding those 20 bits in its memory cells. To be rewritten or read, it needed to be accessed by an external device which used one access pad for each memory cell. What Thinfilm and PARC have now developed is the ability to print not only the memory cells, but to also print the logic onto the same substrate needed to manage those memory cells.

…Thinfilm and PARC aren't working in a vacuum. 'There are a number of companies, [Thinfilm CEO] Sutija told us, 'that have been working on printed sensors, printed power sources, printed displays, and we're going to be active in build an ecosystem with these other partners to be able to then create integrated products.'"

"...produced a working prototype of a printed ferroelectric polymer non-volatile memory that is addressed with p- and n-type organic circuits, the equivalent of CMOS circuitry.

The companies claimed that the combination of Thin Film's printed memory and PARC's organic addressing regime is the key to producing roll-to-roll printable memory that can be used in the Internet-of-Things where everything has an IP address and is connected to the Internet via a smart tag. Such smart tags require rewritable nonvolatile memory that is low cost and supports integration with sensors and other electronic components, which this technology supports, the companies said.

...The prototype will be publicly demonstrated at PARC on Monday, Oct. 24, in conjunction with a visit from the Norwegian Minister of Trade and Industry, His Excellency Trond Giske."

"Printing enables low-cost advantages and novel form factors not easily attained by other electronics-manufacturing methods. The applications, from consumer electronics to biomedical devices, are endless. A great deal of progress has been made recently in printed electronics, but why don't we see printed devices around us everyday, everywhere?"

"The drive to web-enable all manner of non-computery things...means that people can be reminded to do something... This 'Internet of Things' is already here… But the design of the notifications — in addition to that of the devices themselves — has to be considered very carefully from the start, according to speakers at Mobilize 2011 on Tuesday.

'There will be a proliferation of smart objects, just like there is a proliferation of apps in the app store,' said Bo Begole, principal scientist at PARC, which does a lot of work in this area. Some of these apps will deal with important healthcare matters and some with less urgent consumer-oriented tasks. That means that the alerts and alarms have to scale accordingly to avoid potentially perilous alarm fatigue. 'We have to unify the feeds into one channel and then prioritize them,' Begole said."

"The year has also been marked by an unusual level of rapid churn among high-profile tech executives...However, high tech has seen some other more graceful exits by CEOs, key executives and engineers... Well, there are many reasons for the wholesale turnover. Take this brief trip with eWEEK through the carousel of CEO departures and other changes."

"PARC coined the term 'ubiquitous computing' in 1988, but it took the next two decades for the PARC researchers’ vision to start becoming a part of the workplace and the rest of everyday life. As manager of PARC’s Ubiquitous Computing Area, Bo Begole is shepherding ubicomp into the mainstream with some help from a variety of other trends -- particularly the growth in cellular and Wi-Fi coverage, smartphone adoption and cloud computing.

Begole recently discussed what enterprises need to consider when deciding where and how to implement ubicomp, both internally and as a way to better serve their customers. One recommendation: People need to feel that they’re always in control."

"Throughout history there is a recurring theme of like-minded individuals coming together to create a shared 'hive mind' intelligence that is greater than its constituent parts. There are extremely rare cases of geniuses that worked on their own, but for the most part almost every famed inventor, pioneer, or philosopher was part of a group or cadre of other great thinkers. The fact is, we work best when we have something to bounce ideas off...

By far the youngest laboratory in this list is PARC, which was set up as a division of Xerox in 1970. By this point all of the major components of computers had already been invented, and so PARC set to work on doing interesting things with computers..."

"PARC will gather as many as 100 researchers in September for the first event focused on content-centric networking, a new direction for organizing Internet traffic. The approach promises greater security and faster connections to popular content but will require new protocols and changes in router chip and systems designs.

Content-centric networking represents a shift from today's focus on using network addresses to find content... The idea is largely the brainchild of Van Jacobson, an Internet pioneer who helped develop multicasting and trace route capabilities for Internet Protocol. About four years ago, Jacobson brought the concept to PARC which has been gestating it ever since."

"A few weeks back, we saw firsthand a hotbed of innovation in a place that many observers had long ago given up on. Its resurrection convinces us that other organizations can do the same by creating a culture of consideration, coordination, and communication, and marrying that culture to a responsive business model. That resurgent hotbed is PARC (formerly Xerox PARC)…

Over the past several years, PARC — spun off as an independent, wholly-owned subsidiary of Xerox in 2002 — has reinvented itself as a font of innovation for Xerox and a variety of other organizations worldwide. It has delivered a stunning array of software and hardware innovations to global corporations, startups, and the U.S. government, and it does a brisk business in IP licensing.

How is it that this place, widely ridiculed 20 years ago, has revived? When we visited, we not only saw pieces of PARC's storied past, but we saw what happens there today, how it happens, and how innovation continues to thrive."

"But the research tools at scientists’ disposal are highly imperfect. Keyword searches, for example, return many hits but offer a poor sense of overall trends.

Scientists at PARC recently developed one such program. It relies on text processors, called parsers, which are typically tested on news articles. Parsers can distinguish between words and punctuation, label parts of speech and analyze a sentence’s grammatical structure. But 'they don’t do as well on Twitter,' says Kyle Dent, one of the Palo Alto researchers. He and his co-author wrote hundreds of rules to account for hash tags, repeated letters (as in “pleaaaaaase”) and other linguistic features perhaps not common in the Wall Street Journal…

Dent and his colleagues also tried to use their program to distinguish between rhetorical questions and those that require a response. Businesses could use such a program to find what people are asking about their products. In a recent trial, their program classified 68 percent of 2,304 tweets correctly. 'For a brand-new field, that sounds like a decent first attempt,' says Jeffrey ­Ellen of the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command, which provides intelligence technology to the U.S. Navy."

Tech leaders ponder future of mobileThe pace of innovation and change in mobile devices is so dizzying it is difficult to predict the winning platforms and products of the next few years.21 July 2011 | PhysOrg by Chris Lefkow

"With that caveat, a panel of technology executives and experts nevertheless took out their crystal balls on Wednesday at the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference in this Colorado resort to take a glimpse into the mobile future.

Before an audience of movers and shakers from Silicon Valley and elsewhere, they looked at trends among smartphones and the fast-growing market for tablet computers pioneered by Apple's iPad.

...Stephen Hoover...said next-generation mobile capability will involve the seamless 'integration of the physical and digital worlds.' Mobile devices will be able to provide 'the information that's most relevant to me now, physically where I am, and in the context of what I'm trying to do,' Hoover said. 'We're at the cusp of really being able to integrate all of these different sources of data and understand people's intention in context and give them the information that's useful at the time they need it,' he said."

ESGR presented the Patriot Award, an Above and Beyond Award, the Seven Seals Award and also the Statement of Support to PARC. PARC was presented "these Prestigious Awards of Honor by one of their own contractors with Securitas Security, Inc, Sergeant Robert M. Lopez, USMCR, currently deployed and is the PARC Security Site Supervisor, who nominated PARC for these honors. PARC and their Directors have a very strong commitment to their employees who serve in our Military Service and have many Veterans in their organization."

"As a manufacturing method printing brings many benefits including processing over large areas at high speed or over curved surfaces. Using an additive method which places the material only where it is required greatly reduces the number of steps needed compared with a subtractive method where the material is deposited everywhere and then etched back into the required pattern. Printing also readily allows digital methods to be used (such as ink-jet), so that new layouts can be created directly from the design, enabling rapid prototyping and facile customization. Furthermore, printing should also enable manufacturing sites to be set up at a fraction of the cost of conventional semiconductor fabrication lines, allowing smaller, more diverse organizations to be involved in the manufacture of electronic components."

100 great things about AmericaSometimes it's easy to overlook our country's glory. For the second year running, we present 100 outstanding things about the U.S.A.1 July 2011 | Fortune/ CNN Money by Andy Serwer

80. PARC

"The Silicon Valley lab where Ethernet and laser printing were born; a veritable genius center for the hatching of big tech ideas."

"And PARC is still at it, hiring Ph.D.’s and putting them to work on some of the world’s bigger technology problems.

…In the new PARC, Xerox is the largest client, but accounts for just half of the center’s overall workload, with the rest for a variety of government and commercial clients. Hoover says PARC has a 'solid business base,' with growing revenues."

"That’s the way Teresa Lunt, VP and director of the computing science lab at PARC, describes the Internet that will be emerging within the next couple of years — driven by content and data that is completely independent of underlying systems or network points..."

"Forty years later, the lab is back at it: Teresa Lunt, VP and director of the computing science lab at PARC, showed off a new networking technology dubbed Content-Centric Networking (CCN) at GigaOM’s Structure conference in San Francisco today.

…Sounds futuristic? Lunt believes that first commercial applications based on CCN could appear in the marketplace within 18 months. PARC has been busy making that happen, partnering with Samsung, releasing CCN open source code for Android and maintaining an open source community at CCNX.org."

"Part two of the researcher's efforts involved applying a machine learning algorithm to the corpus of 10,000 active Twitter users' recent tweets. While it wasn't able to pull out their address or even their zip code, it was able to determine what country and state users inhabited. Analyzing the data after the fact, the researchers even discovered that some terms were highly predictive of location."

"Scientists have discovered how fragments of the protein collagen might have survived in fossilized dinosaur bones…The results, which are published in PLoS ONE, support the contentious claim that dinosaur proteins have been recovered and sequenced.

The study is 'interesting and plausible, but speculative', says Marshall Bern, a computer scientist at Palo Alto Research Center in California, who has also analysed dinosaur-protein data. 'It's hard to extrapolate too far from the little bit of sequence that has been found,' he says."

"As great a step forward as today's context aware systems are, though, they still depend on a limited set of clues about who you are and what you want. The next step will be to tie additional clues from the physical world to the online clues, and to put some intelligence behind interpreting the purpose of your information gathering, and to then predict what information you will need and what your next steps might be in using it. This may sound like either a step toward Big Brother or an impossible dream. In fact, some of these systems already exist. Ubiquitous Computing for Business, a new book by Bo Begole, Principal Scientist at PARC, delineates the possible sources for contextual intelligence that these systems might use…"

From Part 1: "Malcolm Gladwell’s article on innovation in The New Yorker entitled Creation Myth is a brilliantly written piece that, in the process of killing some innovation myths, creates some new ones…What Gladwell’s article doesn’t shed any light on is how the Apple of the 2000s (and other firms) have learned how to generate continuous innovation in sector after sector, along with disciplined execution. Nor does it shed any light on how the world of innovation in the 1980s is fundamentally different from the world of innovation in 2011."

From Part 2: "What has emerged over the last decade is a group of firms...that have learned how to get to the root of the problem and combine continuous innovation with disciplined execution. They are managed in a radically different way from traditional management. Their practices create workplaces that are congenial to the 'commandos' while also generating disciplined execution and customer delight. There are five fundamental and interlocking shifts."

"There is an inevitable friction in bringing ideas to life within a company. That friction can polish an idea and make it stronger, sand the edges of the idea and make it weaker, or kill the idea altogether. Anyone who works in innovation is familiar with that tension. Navigating it is part of what makes innovation so difficult.

Malcolm Gladwell wrote an illustrative New Yorker article on the mythic 1979 story of Steve Jobs and Xerox PARC...

The modern day Xerox PARC replied to Gladwell’s article with a fascinating post on the merits of open innovation as one way to resolve that friction…

There is no longer merely a 'go' or a 'stop' in innovation, as Gladwell originally characterized. There are other options for the golden eggs."

"In his latest piece, Gladwell goes a step further in his exploration of innovation, in writing about the difference between invention and innovation, picking apart the classic story of Steve Jobs seeing the GUI/mouse combo at Xerox PARC and "copying" it for the Macintosh. Gladwell points out that the lessons that some take from the story aren't really correct…

It's interesting to see that the modern day PARC has responded to the story directly, pointing to some key 'lessons learned' that are demonstrated by the article, and with some additional background…

The PARC blog also talks up the importance of 'open innovation,' and sharing ideas outside of a company, recognizing (frequently) that others may be better able to take an idea and run with it by creating something really powerful on top of that."

"While there I met with several people to get a taste of what they are working on now. Visiting here is like visiting Jerusalem (home of the first church). It’s where everything seemed to start and is still filled with brilliant people."

"As Gladwell says in his story, it’s difficult for a company to be both a true innovator and one that can readily bring consumer products to market. And as the patents show, Xerox PARC and Apple weren’t adversaries, because it seems they were never competing for the same prize."

"PARC and its partners will design, develop, and deliver an integrated lifecycle decision-support toolkit for fractionated spacecraft architectures. When completed, the FRACSAT toolkit will enable space mission designers to rapidly generate feasible mission architectures, select optimal design solutions given programmatic uncertainty, justify the business case using mission-relevant cost and benefit metrics, and adapt to unforeseen events or changes during the program lifecycle for maximum mission impact."

"Three staff members at PARC, aka Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center, have published a feisty response to Malcolm Gladwell’s May 16 New Yorker article, 'Creation Myth: Xerox PARC, Apple, and the Truth about Innovation.' In short, the post acknowledges that the legend of Xerox PARC—the oft, oft, oft-repeated story (repeated once again by Gladwell) that Xerox 'flubbed the future' by giving away its best idea ever, the personal computer, to a young Steve Jobs—is basically true. But the essay points out that it took some circumstances unique to PARC to generate the idea in the first place, and that the story wouldn’t play out the same way if were happening today.

...PARC is now largely in the business of open innovation, helping its clients capitalize on their own technologies and seasoning them with concepts homegrown at PARC."

"Malcolm Gladwell retells the story of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in the latest issue of the New Yorker… The story of PARC is fascinating, and Gladwell provides a nice twist to it.

…This leads to a key point. PARC is still there, and they are still coming up with brilliant ideas. It has actually been an incredibly successful operation for an extended period of time. By focusing on the ideas that didn’t work so well for them, we recreate a myth of innovation – that every idea that we have must work for us to be successful."

I can’t tell you how many times we’ve heard this... Because most companies have incremental and next-generation innovation down – it’s the disruptive, non-core, 'next big thing' innovation that eludes many and presents the most challenges. Yet this type of innovation is a necessity for any business that wants to access new markets, create a new line of revenue, or re-invent themselves in anticipation of future directions. So here’s my question: what happens AFTER you conceive the next killer app for your industry?

Creation MythXerox PARC, Apple, and the truth about innovation.9 May 2011 | The New Yorker by Malcolm Gladwell

"The fair question is whether Xerox, through its research arm in Palo Alto, found a better way to be Xerox -- and the answer is that it did, although that story doesn't get told nearly as often." ... "Gary Starkweather's laser printer made billions for Xerox. It paid for every other single project at Xerox PARC, many times over."

"Experts say the overall pace of innovation in the IT industry will speed up, resulting in a mind-boggling array of developments…These changes will revolutionize industries... 'I use the term technology avalanche,' says Dave Evans, Chief Futurist at Cisco. 'We're on the precipice of huge developments. Things are going to start changing very, very quickly...Where it's going is unlimited computer and storage and networking speeds, and the birth of some pretty exciting times.'

Here are predictions that leading researchers are making about what IT will look like in the year 2036: ...21. A fundamentally different Internet architecture may evolve. Researchers at PARC are working on a new underlying architecture for the Internet called content-centric networking…"

"ThinFilm Electronics announced the first commercially available rewriteable memory device produced using roll-to-roll printing processes...ThinFilm received its first order through one of the ten largest toy manufacturers out of Japan and hopes to apply its technology to interactive games, collector cards, RFID, and biometric applications. The company is targeting addressable applications of 40- to 128-bit memories and hopes soon to merge printed transistors together through an alliance with PARC."

"Research and development is under budgetary pressures these days, and yet more and more executives are touting its benefits. Why is there a disconnect? And what can be done about it?

The primary issue around R&D spending is that by itself, research and development doesn't guarantee profitability. Companies must weigh how much they are willing to invest in future innovations that may never pan out.

During the Internet Evolution Radio program this past week, Dr. Steve Hoover, CEO of the Palo Alto Research Center, noted that companies need to really prioritize research and development projects based on their long-term investments."

"Researchers also mined Delicious for data. The Palo Alto Research Center, for example, used the tagging data created by Delicious and other social-bookmarking services to build an engine for Web search and exploration."

"A new manufacturing process developed by Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) will increase the energy a lithium-ion battery can store by 40%. The technology is similar to that of printed solar cells...

It seems the free gift with purchase here is not going to be shaving off the cost but extending the cars range to meet our perceived driving needs. As drivers of the Chevy Volt are already reporting 1,000 miles per tank, it will be interesting to see if PARC can change the electric car industry as they did solar."

"I often catch up on my reading backlog on airplanes, and it was on a recent flight that I had the opportunity to attack about five issues of Computer, the IEEE Computer Society’s monthly journal. Computer is very often the carrier of excellent articles that make a contribution to clear and positive thinking on technology in general and information technology in particular. It was thus that I read the November 2010 issue and believe that it is a 'must read' for anyone truly interested in the future of social media and its impact on the world as we know it.

This was a special edition co-edited by Peter Pirolli (Palo Alto Research Center) and Jenny Preece and Ben Shneiderman (University of Maryland) on technology-mediated social participation (TMSP)."

“The design, which combines Thinfilm’s memory technology with PARC’s printed transistor technology, allows compact higher-density printed memories and enables new applications, including integration with other printed elements, such as sensors, power sources, and antennas. The prototypes for the addressable memory will be ready during 2011. Transfer to production is expected in 2012. There are significant horizontal markets, markets that meet the needs of a wide variety of industries, waiting for this technology to be ready.”

This is a guest post from PARC, which became an independent Xerox subsidiary in 2002. One of the first areas PARC examined was cleantech. What follows are some steps and thoughts on balancing the environment, impact and commercial realities...

"PARC and Thinfilm's collaboration on next-generation printed memory solutions kicked off last year with joint design of Thinfilm 128-bit Addressable Memory, which combines Thinfilm's unique non-volatile memory technology with PARC's printed CMOS transistor technology. Given the success of the initial design phase, this next phase extends the engagement to prototyping the product for manufacturing readiness."

"While the solar cell application has a near-term sales opportunity, commercial application of the technology to battery electrodes is probably 2-3 years out, Elrod noted. There is further opportunity for the method in air cathodes. The current density in an air-breathing electrode is proportional to the amount of electro-catalytic surface area that is exposed to air. The PARC technology provides a directed-assembly printing method for producing a greater proportion of this 'three-phase boundary' than conventional electrode manufacturing methods—up to 10x the air-breathing surface area of conventional electrodes."

"...the system will be used for the epitaxial growth of InGaAlN LEDs, laser diodes, and electronic devices. A local Aixtron support team will commission the new reactor within a specially dedicated facility in PARC's electronic materials and devices research division...

'We will be able to develop new processes in a commercial reactor that are compatible with a prospective scale-up to full production scale in due course. Working closely with the experienced Aixtron support team, our group expects to, for example, quickly optimize conditions for growth of GaN alloys with a high percentage of Al as required for deep-UV optical emitting devices.'"

"The many office parks of the Silicon Valley hold a myriad of technology firms large and small trying to make a name for themselves in the annals of history. There are obvious giants like Apple and HP, but another player, Xerox, is one which can be credited with a chunk of the modern technology we take for granted. The company many are most familiar with in regards to copiers is also the founder of PARC, a research and development subsidiary that is independent and wholly owned. It has been known for inventions and game changers such as laser printing, the graphical user interface and Ethernet connectivity.

PARC has recently turned its attention to the developing cleantech space, focusing on areas like an experimental system for modeling and evaluation of geothermal reservoirs. To get a better handle on what PARC has in mind around a cleantech tomorrow, we turned to Dr. Scott Elrod, who directs the organization’s efforts in this area."

"Thin Film has been commercializing printed, rewritable memory using ferroelectric polymer material for application in specific markets — including toys and games — for a number of years and is developing contact‐based memory arrays for higher‐capacity applications."

"Thin Film Electronics ASA ('Thinfilm') is a publicly-listed Norwegian technology company with its head office in Oslo and product development in Linköping, Sweden. Thinfilm is a pioneer in the field of Printed Electronics, and provides fully-printed non-volatile, rewritable memory for applications in toys & games, logistics, sensor, and ID systems...

Using printing to manufacture electronic memory makes it possible to reduce the number of process steps, resulting in dramatically lower manufacturing costs, and also reduced environmental impact as compared to traditional semiconductor processes."

"PARC has been assigned a patent (7,897,439)...for an 'electronic device with unique encoding.' The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: 'An electronic device comprising a thin film transistor (TFT) array and manufacturing methods thereof according to various embodiments. Jet-printed material is deposited on selected partially formed transistors to form completed transistors... Such uniquely encoded devices have applications for encryption, identification and personalization of electronic systems.'"

"United States Patent no. 7,906,722, issued on March 15, was assigned to Palo Alto Research Center Inc. (Palo Alto, Calif.) 'Concentrating Solar Collector with Solid Optical Element'. According to the abstract released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: 'A Cassegrain-type concentrating solar collector cell includes primary and secondary mirrors disposed on opposing convex and concave surfaces of a light-transparent (e.g., glass) optical element. Light enters an aperture surrounding the secondary mirror, and is reflected by the primary mirror toward the secondary mirror, which re-reflects the light onto a photovoltaic cell mounted on a central region surrounded by the convex surface. The primary and secondary mirrors are preferably formed as mirror films that are deposited or plated directly onto the optical element. A concentrating solar collector array includes a sheet-like optical panel including multiple optical elements arranged in rows. The photovoltaic cells are mounted directly onto the optical panel, and the primary mirrors of the individual collector cells include metal film segments that are coupled by the photovoltaic cells to facilitate transmission of the generated electrical energy. Bypass diodes are connected in parallel with the photovoltaic cells.'"

"Even the most systematic conversion flow can leave visitors lost or frustrated if it lacks a strong and obvious connection to other content on your site that could maintain or increase the visitor's psychological momentum toward the conversion goal.

Researchers Peter Pirolli and Stuart Card at PARC (formerly known as Xerox PARC) have worked for many years on their information foraging theory. It describes how people hunt for information on the Web much like wild animals in search of their prey. They follow information scent in order to determine if they are getting closer to their goal. They will keep clicking on additional links if they feel that the scent is getting stronger. Otherwise, they might simply give up and start foraging in some other location (your competitor's website, for example).

The information scent is conveyed by clues in a visitor's immediate environment, usually in the form of links on the page. Tuning your multiple-page conversion flow may include enhancing the information scent at various steps in the flow and testing the connections between pages."

"Two of the projects Elrod and PARC were discussing at last week’s ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit in Washington DC were a technology for the co-extrusion printing of novel battery electrodes, enabling higher energy and/or power densities; and an approach to producing carbon-neutral renewable hydrocarbon fuels using air, water and CO2 captured from the atmosphere.

Electrodes. ...The PARC technology provides a directed-assembly printing method for producing a greater proportion of this 'three-phase boundary' than conventional electrode manufacturing methods—up to 10x the air-breathing surface area of conventional electrodes...

Carbon-neutral liquid fuel. ...In a paper published in the RSC journal Energy & Environmental Science, the PARC researchers present results indicating that the energy consumption required to regenerate CO2 gas from aqueous bicarbonate (carbonate) solutions using this method can be as low as 100 kJ (200 kJ) per mol of CO2 in the small-current-density limit."

IEEE Computer Society Names Technical Achievement WinnersFive technologists who have made outstanding and innovative contributions to the fields of computer and information science and engineering or computer technology will be recipients of 2011 IEEE Computer Society Technical Achievement Awards.8 March 2011 | IEEE Computer Society by release

"Garcia-Luna-Aceves received a BS in electrical engineering from the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City in 1977, and an MS and PhD in electrical engineering from the University of Hawaii at Manoa in 1980 and 1983, respectively. He holds the Jack Baskin Endowed Chair of Computer Engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz, is chair of the Computer Engineering Department, and is a principal scientist at the Palo Alto Research Center. Prior to joining UCSC, he was a center director at SRI International. He has been a visiting professor at Sun Laboratories and a principal of protocol design at Nokia. His research focuses on computer communication. Garcia-Luna-Aceves is a Fellow of IEEE, AAAS, and ACM. He holds 35 US patents, has published three books, and more than 400 journal and conference papers, and has supervised more than 30 PhD dissertations."

"As a later PARC memo on the specifications of the PUP [PARC Universal Packet] noted:

Pup communication is end-to-end at the packet level. The inter-network is required only to be able to transport independently addressed Pups from source to destination. Use of higher levels of protocol is entirely the responsibility of the communicating end processes.

This moved control over the operation of the network from the connecting infrastructure to the actual devices participating in the network themselves. This was a centrifugal approach, and it suited the requirements of the network of networks that ARPA had in mind."

"'Content distribution has reached a scale that simply doesn't work,' says Van Jacobson. The scientist and research fellow at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center talks to ZDNet's Sumi Das about Content-Centric Networking (CCN) a new technology he's developed that could make content distribution on the Net more efficient."

"A new printing technology that can produce more efficient electrodes for batteries has been developed by engineers at PARC. The electrodes could improve the energy storage capacity of batteries by 10% to 30%, with minimal effect on manufacturing cost, they say. The printing technology specially aligns electrode and conductive materials."

Why the U.S. Must Promote EngineeringAmerica will suffer in global competition without reengineering its attitudes toward engineering...2 March 2011 | Bloomberg BusinessWeek by Viewpoint

"The PARC Hydrodynamic Separation technology is a low-cost, energy efficient technology whose potential applications include municipal water treatment and pretreating seawater for desalination. Given how critical the shortage of drinkable water is all over the world, this is an exciting breakthrough."

"I caught up with Scott Elrod...while we were both at the 2nd annual ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit near Washington.

In this era of government cutbacks, I think it’s important to underline the importance of continued public funding for long-term technology research and development that may not lead to profitable products for some time.

In this video, I asked Elrod to describe the importance of government funding to some of his company’s work."

"PARC has developed a new printing technology that promises to pack more energy into batteries for electric vehicles...

The biggest challenge for electric vehicles remains bringing down the size and cost of their batteries. For them to compete with conventional vehicles, some experts estimate, battery costs must come down by about 75 percent. And if the batteries could store more energy, automakers could use fewer of them, thus saving money...

The work is still at an early stage, but the basic printing concept has been proved with a method PARC developed for printing thin silver lines on solar cells; these are being commercialized by a major solar manufacturer..."

"The inbox, used appropriately, can be one of the most successful productivity tools of all time. For most of us, however, it ends up being a huge time sink.

That was one of the findings of Victoria Bellotti of PARC, who combines backgrounds in psychology and human-computer interaction to study how people are actually using (and misusing) the digital technologies that are supposed to make their lives easier. Bellotti, who spoke at last week’s Inbox Love conference in Silicon Valley, says that in the case of email, certain practices are particularly unproductive...

Overall, Bellotti says, startups and enterprises could do a lot to improve the email experience. Particularly useful would be tools to make it easier to determine which bits of information are important, and once having determined that, to be able to find them.

'I would love to see email turned into a knowledge worker’s dashboard,” she says. “It should be integrated with SMS and voicemail and social networking… and your system should have the capability to recommend these things that might be a priority.'"

All of the speakers were against the notion that email was a dying technology, next to more social and instant interactions such as Facebook and instant messaging...

Victoria Bellotti of Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) said its researchers had studied the inbox as a habitat and found that it was doing a lot of things it wasn’t designed for – to-do lists, project tracking, document archiving and batch processing.

It was a Grand Central Station for knowledge work, where people were still doing most of their communication. Overload was a real problem, where people could be handling 30 different threads of conversations at the same time as well as their regular work."

"PARC, which started out as Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, is rightly famous for its role in the development of far-reaching technology like Ethernet, the laser printer, and the graphical user interface. But, as with some of the great industrial labs of an earlier era, PARC has slipped out of the public view, even as it was spun out from Xerox as an independent entity. But PARC is still around, and recently celebrated its 40th birthday. We had the chance to chat with its CEO, Mark Bernstein, shortly before he announced his departure. Bernstein described how PARC has evolved over the years, and talked a bit about the end of the blue sky research labs that US companies used to support...

He ended on a note of optimism, focusing on the efforts of Energy Secretary Steven Chu (formerly the head of the nearby Lawrence Berkeley Labs) to direct these labs and the Department's stimulus money into technology development, including blue-sky work funded by an advanced projects (ARPA-E) group. 'I'd like to see what happened in 2009—that the government rethinks... how scientific funding is allocated,' Bernstein said, 'and they look more towards what the Obama administration seems to be focused on, to invest in the potential collaboration between academia, industry, and the government to build new industries, to create jobs.'"

As part of its transformation from an internal research center to a commercial business, PARC has needed to innovate its business practices, as well as its research and technology. How do we balance the seemingly conflicting goals of long-term research vs. short-term profits, of creating breakthrough innovations vs. providing client services, of diversifying research into many markets vs. developing critical mass in just a few?

"The time for PMDs might finally be at hand ... even if the first application is the humble radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags used in retail store product tracking and toll-road electronic collection systems.

As silicon technologies plunge ever deeper into nano-scale dimensions, pushing microchip densities to the level of the atom, business is looking for inexpensive alternatives to ever-more complex and costly silicon-based memory systems -- the collection of microchips that determines the size and number of programs that a computer can run simultaneously, as well as the amount of data that can be instantly processed.

...But it's Thinfilm, which has 15 years of experience in the field of non-volatile memories using functional polymers, that seems to be everywhere, working with just about everyone else in the polymer memory field.

...Researchers at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) have been developing a suite of materials for making printed electronics, including sensors and transistors. PARC works with Thinfilm to make higher-capacity printed memory devices that incorporate the research center's printed transistors."

Finding inbox meaning in a time of overloadEmail is a habitat: the place where many knowledge workers spend most of their working day online. [invited/ guest contributed]4 February 2011 | Inbox Love blog by Victoria Bellotti

"Email is, for many knowledge workers, a habitat: the place where they spend most of their working day online. Indeed it can be thought of as knowledge work’s Grand Central Station as far as information distribution and workflow are concerned...When taking prototypes to the real world as products, the main challenge for new technology adoption in this area is that people tend to stick with the email client they have, despite its shortcomings. This could be due to factors such as employer policy, dependency on legacy content, or fear of upheaval in mission-critical aspects of work. And makers of the dominant mail clients do not seem to be highly motivated to overhaul the email user’s experience."

"an exclusive 'Countdown to RSA 2011' Podcast Series hosted by the Identity Theft Assistance Center with Richard Chow, Research Scientist at PARC and Markus Jakobsson, Technology Strategist for Customer Security and Malware at PayPal. Both of these gentlemen are participating in an RSA panel called 'Trends in Mobile Authentication and Fraud Deterrence'"

World's first printed rewritable memory array with logic circuitryThin Film Electronics with PARC have completed the design of a 128-bit addressable memory. The design combines Thinfilm's memory with transistor technology developed by PARC, and includes CMOS circuitry to significantly contact pads.21 January 2011 | EE Times Europe by Julien Happich

"Thinfilm and PARC announced in October that they are working to provide next-generation memory tags using printed electronics, and is now developing prototypes of the addressable memory. These prototypes will be ready later this year. Transfer to production is expected in 2012."

"Big picture: The PARC report explains convincingly that you shouldn’t take the self-reported geographic information in Twitter profiles at face value. And, I’d argue, that extends to the rest of the information as well. On the other hand, if you’re an advertiser trying to find a lot of Justin Bieber fans, this stuff may be very, very useful."

"Websites that track your buying and browsing habits can seem to read your mind - but you ain't seen nothing yet. Future sites may attempt to gauge your personality, and tailor what they show you accordingly.

That's the possibility raised by a new study of computer gamers, which has revealed that a player's behaviour within the game mimics their real-world character traits. Using similar information from the internet as a whole, it might one day be possible to profile a web surfer's personality.

Most sites currently present the same content and layout to everyone who visits...

Nick Yee and colleagues at PARC in California reckoned this personalisation could be made far more sophisticated if websites could assess visitors' personalities. He also had a hunch that the real-world traits that define an individual's personality could be gleaned from their online behaviour...

"The design of the world's first printed rewritable memory array with logic circuitry is ready... The design combines Thinfilm's memory technology with transistor technology developed by PARC, and includes CMOS circuitry to significantly reduce the number of contact pads necessary to control the Thinfilm Memory."

WikipleadiaThe promise and perils of crowdsourcing content13 January 2011 | The Economist

"Wikipedia’s leaders say this reflects the fact that the large majority of subjects have now been written about. Perhaps, but some evidence suggests that neophytes are being put off by Wikipedia’s clique of elite editors. One study by researchers at PARC looked at the number of times editorial changes were subsequently reversed. It found that roughly a quarter of the edits posted by occasional contributors were undone in late 2008, compared with less than 2% of those posted by the most active editors. And it noted that this gap had widened considerably over time."

In September, PARC announced it was one of four project teams chosen by NSF to pursue ways to build a ''more trustworthy and robust Internet.''

...In November, PARC and PowerCloud Systems Inc. announced the spinout of PowerCloud Systems, which has been incubated at PARC since early 2008 and is initially focusing on offering cloud-managed networking solutions for small and medium-sized businesses.

...Also in November, PARC and Soligie Inc. announced an agreement aimed at advancing the commercialization of printed electronics technologies and capabilities. In September, Thin Film Electronics ASA, a provider of advanced printed memory technology, and PARC announced that they are working together to provide next-generation memory technology enabled through printed electronics."